The short version: Someone has offered on our house. They want to complete as soon as possible, and definitely before the stamp duty holiday ends. We aren't sure we will be able to find and buy a house in that timeframe, and we are hesitant about breaking the chain and completing our sale without having a purchase to complete at the same time. Should we accept their offer or would that be potentially messing them around? The perfect house could crop up tomorrow, we just don't know.
The long version: There's a lot of moving parts to this story so here is the TLDR bit so as not to drip feed.
We were getting ready to go on the market in March (great timing eh?) and then lockdown hit so we had to wait. Finally went on in September (after taking a brief pause in summer when house viewings and the market reopened, as we were having a baby).
Fast forward two months and we have an offer made on our house. Great! That means we are finally proceedable to offer on houses ourselves...except there are no suitable houses available right now. We have quite tight parameters to stick to including a small school catchment and need a certain number of bedrooms or capacity to do a first floor extension. Even houses that don't fit the bill but would do for a year or two aren't coming up at the moment. There is no rental market in the area we wish to move to, so that isn't an option either. We have to move within the next year as we'll be applying for my eldest's secondary school place in Oct 2021.
An added complication to this is that the great mortgage deal we had in September when lenders were looking at annualised earnings is no longer on offer. Lenders are now looking at just the last 3 months payslips. Our household income varies massively during the year, so right now we can borrow a lot less than we could a few months ago, and next Spring, under the current lending criteria, we will be able to borrow 100k more which would get us a 'forever' house.
So financially, our ideal would be to purchase in Spring. Although I worry leaving it till then could mean we miss the deadline altogether to move before school applications as that only leaves about 6 months and that's not long when you think about how often sales fall through and the hold ups that could happen. Plus given that we originally started trying to move in March so now I’m very wary of unforeseen delays.
The people who want to offer on our house understandably want to complete before the stamp duty holiday deadline and are pressing our agent to know whether we would be willing to break the chain. They have a cash buyer for their property (developer) so things could potentially move quite quickly on their end. This is the first and only offer we’ve had in the 2.5 months we’ve been on market for, so I don’t want to assume we could get another buyer quickly if this fell through. But then, I think we would see a lot more interest if we lowered the asking price a bit, which we would be able to do in the new year.
We have the option to stay with family short term whilst we house hunt. But we aren't sure whether we want to break the chain. One the one hand, it puts us in a great position to buy when the next house comes along that works for us. On the other hand, our prefered option would be to protect our current house, as if everything falls through and for whatever reason we end up not being able to make a move happen, we quite like our current house.Breaking the chain makes me feel a bit nervous and like it could be a bit of a gamble.
The right house for us could come on the market any minute, and in the current market the local agents aren't taking offers seriously if you aren't proceedable or under offer yourself. I just can't guarantee to our buyers that we can work to their timeframe of the end of march stamp duty deadline.
My husband thinks we shouldn’t accept any offers unless the buyer is happy to wait for us to find somewhere. I think that anyone looking to buy in the next month or so is going to want to complete before end of March.
Anyway if you've managed to read through all of that and can make sense of our situation, what would you do in this situation? A lot of this is so circumstantial with a lot of "What if's" (plus baby brain!) that it's making it quite hard for me to think straight about it.
Do we keep a buyer so we can continue to look for houses even though we might not be able to work to their deadline? Or do we pause on selling our house until late winter / early Spring when (hopefully!) there will be more housing stock, and we will have significantly more budget?